The Judge RANTS!
Date: 18/11/11
"Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral" (*)
It's a bit frustrating when you can't find a way adequately to express your anger and frustration with the way things are going in the world; you know, the nasty, venal thugs-in-office, the use of State force of one sort or another to intimidate and beat down those with a more humane moral view of the world, and the attempts to cow us (or bull us) into compliance, obedience and silence.
I'm lucky, though - I have a friend who can express it for me far better than I find myself able to. Take it away, Alex:
"A war is going on, but it is not the war you see in the news. It's not being fought in dusty foreign streets by decent men and women in camo fatigues - though Gods know, if you think about it their fight's just a symptom of this one.
"This is a fight taking place in the streets of American, British and European towns and cities. And it is a deadly one, with an overwhelmingly powerful enemy that has its claws in the influential people who roam the halls of power, and it is not afraid to use its influence.
"This enemy is dangerous, expansionistic, imperialist and Hell bent on conquering and enslaving. It is fighting by subornation, by smear campaigns, and when these fail it uses our own society's protectors against us, turning cops into pawns of their Will.
"This battle is even now going on in the halls of power to strip the people of the one thing we have that they have not yet poisoned and tarnished: the freedom to communicate with one another through this internet of ours.
"They want our blind, compliant obedience. They want our silence.
"They demand our consent, at gunpoint if necessary, by default if the guns fail.
"The enemy is Ambition. The enemy is Greed. The enemy is ... well, the enemy is Power, frankly, and the delusion of Entitlement.
"I would say that the indigo children have come to rule, and what spoiled bastards they are when they do claim the reins of power - but truth is, there's an awful lot of cookie cutter old, fat, bald white men out there, all wearing identical $2000 Worsted suits, and they've never been poor but somehow they all claim to know what it's like.
"We all know the enemy, though. The real enemy.
"It's our complacency.
"We were blinded to the lessons of as early as twenty years ago. 1991, the Berlin Wall had come down, Clinton was about to pull a miracle in Northern Ireland, Nelson Mandela was out of Robben Island, the Soviet Union was about to fall down. Back then, the future really did look so rosy.
"We had no idea that the next few years would prove so shitty. Even Labour destroying the Tories in 1997 only provided a tiny glimmer of relief. We'd had Desert Storm, we had Eastern Europe in flames, and not long afterwards would come Rwanda and genocide, and seemingly an endless war going in on Africa.
"Back home, scandals. Financial, political. John Major, the British PM, with his "Back to Basics", all his crap about family values while at the same time not only was one of his MPs dying of autoerotic asphyxiation with a satsuma in his mouth and a plastic bag over his head, but Johnny Boy himself, that old hypocrite, was boning Edwina Currie.
"We had the Clinton scandal - the right wing finding his weakness and pressing home the advantage (why couldn't you have seen this and put a stop to it back then, before they became the Tea Party loonies?) - and we had the birth of spin doctoring and tabloid excesses and the death of Diana.
"We had our scare stories that never happened - back then it was SARS and Y2K, with foot and mouth ten years ago.
"And we had a fight on our hands back then, with the Tories and then Labour pushing and pushing relentlessly for mandatory biometric ID cards and a DNA database with mandatory contributions from all donors, innocent or otherwise.
"We have had to fight this corrupt core of evil at the top of Western society, now, for more than thirty years. Back in 1981, we were being demonised by the state's puppets in the right wing tabloids just for having the temerity to be unemployed. Thirty years on, nothing changes.
"It's been a long, long fight; but all across the world, this year, people have started to realise that those who have put themselves in power have not had the public's interests at all. The cynics and conspiracy theorists complaining about the stifling, corrupt State have been vindicated. The people are just realising how evil those at the top truly are, and we are starting to rattle the cages now, on the eve of the bastards welding the cage door permanently shut.
"We are being locked into this cage, an entire generation of people being rounded up for a workforce of slaves to perform the functions of society for no money while those who have siphoned off all the money sit back and laugh at all the poor and starving people. Their slaves. Their servants. Their entertainment when we lie down and die.
"And all the while, the priests try and silence our protests with false promises of Heaven for the faithful and Hell for the deviants. Just as they used to do, when feudalism ruled the world.
"This world faces a crisis which could see the rise of a new form of feudalism, replacing democracy as the dominant political form. A handful of people at the top, owning everything, accountable to no-one but themselves, and ranks of people below them with lesser degrees of power, answerable to increasing numbers of people until the Ponzi pyramid gets right down to us, at the bottom, answerable to everybody, nobody to command, and our only job being to put up those pyramids and statues and temples to worship the movers and shakers at the top.
"2012 is around the corner, and an ending could be upon us - this has the potential of getting far worse before it gets any better, with tear gas giving way to baton rounds to live ammunition, with some dickheads using the possible future dissolution of the EU as an excuse to reinstate the death penalty in the UK, and with the State putting padlocks on the internet and having armed boot boy rentacops on every street corner before people start pulling their finger out and take the fight home to the wankers in charge.
"Because we need to get through, somehow, to those men with the guns that they are not fighting some screaming enemy coming at them with a bomb in one hand and a barbaric curse in their mouths. They are gunning down their own.
"They are shooting at their own wives, sons, daughters.
"And they are watching us fall, only to start getting up again, and keep on coming, because we are now no longer afraid to die: and it would be preferable to life under the thumb of those whose commands are behind the pulled triggers.
"Yes, there is a war going on. And yes, the grim fears of the last ten years have come true: this war is taking place right here, right now, in our own homes and streets.
"It's a war against everything that we should have been fighting against before, but did not. It's a war against the callousness of humans towards their own. It's a war against Brecht's maxim of "Grub first, ethics later."
"And like it or not, we are at, or approaching, the end game.
"Perhaps, in this moment of crisis, we can evolve. I think we must. The alternative is slavery and extinction.
"And I would rather join Peter Carroll in practising my sorceries among the stars, rather than huddled in the ruins.
(*) "Eating comes first, then Ethics" (Berthold Brecht)
